The revolutionary movement and the union question after the defeat of the 1920s

The
proletarian currents which escaped from the degeneration of the Communist
International (CI) found themselves confronted with the enormous task of
resisting the counter-rev­olutionary offensive on all levels -- political,
theoretical, and organizational. This resist­ance had to take place in an
atmosphere of almost total disorientation, one of the main sources of which was
the errors of the CI itself, notably on the parliamentary and union questions.
The working class' retreat from revolutionary activity didn't allow the debates
on these questions to unfold in a positive manner. The critiques which the
Italian, German and Dutch left communists made of the politics of the CI couldn't
be really deepened. At the end of the 1920's, with Stalinism triumphant, the
debate had to continue in the most difficult and complex conditions. Thus,
concerning the union question, the evolution of the various branches of the
internationalist communist opposition (the Italian left, council communists,
the left opposition animated by Trotsky, etc) took place in a groping, uneven
manner. In fact, the revolutionary movement faced a two-pronged problem as far
as the evolution of the unions was concerned. On the one hand, it had to pose the union question in
relation to the per­iod of decadence. On the other hand, it had to understand
the effects of the counter-revolution on this question. It had to draw out all
the political implications of the integration of the unions into the bourgeois
order, while at the same time elaborating a critique of the CI's tactic of
entering into the ‘reformist' unions in order to provoke splits
that would lead to the emergence of real class unions controlled and led by revolutionaries.

The
orientation within the Communist International

Ever
since the formation of the Third Inter­national, the union question had been at
the centre of a whole series of discussions and polemics. It was within the
German revol­utionary movement that the problem was posed in the most urgent
way, and it was the German revolutionaries who understood most clearly the need
for a break not only with the trade unions, but also with ‘trade unionism'. At
the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in late December
1918, ie in a pre-revolutionary moment, a majority tendency declared itself to
be in favor of leaving the trade unions. Thus Paul Frolich said:

"We
say as a matter of principle that the separation of the workers into political organizations
and union organizations, once necessary, must now be finished with. For us,
there can only be one slogan: ‘Leave the unions!'"

Rosa Luxemburg rejected this slogan, but only for
tactical reasons:

"The trade unions are no longer workers' organizations,
but the most reliable protectors of the bourgeois state and bourgeois society.
It therefore goes without saying that the struggle for socialism inevitably
calls for a struggle for the liquidation of the unions. We're all agreed on
that point. But I have a different opinion on the way to go forward. I think
the Hamburg comrades are wrong to call for the formation of unitary
economic-political organizations (einheits-organi­sation), because, in my
opinion, the tasks of the unions must be taken up by the workers' and soldiers'
councils"(Congress
of the Spartacus League, Ed. Spartacus, no.83B).

Unfortunately
the leadership of the CI didn't see things so clearly -- on the contrary. While
the CI denounced the unions dominated by the Social Democracy, it still had all
sorts of illusions about wresting leadership of the unions out of its hands.
Despite the critiques of the left -- especially the German left, which split
from the KPD to form the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) -- the CI
main­tained its erroneous position. In March 1920, in an ‘Address to the Unions
in all Countries', after a summary analysis of the degeneration of the ‘old'
reformist unions, the CI expl­ained:

"Will the unions return to the old, worn-out,
reformist ie effectively bourgeois-habits? That is the decisive question now
being posed to the international workers' movement. We are firmly convin­ced
that this won't happen. A current of fresh air is sweeping through the stuffy
structures of the old unions. A process of decantation has already begun. In
one or two years, the old unions will be unrecognizable. The old bureaucrats of
the trade union movement will be like generals without an army. The new epoch
will produce a new generation of proletarian leaders in the renovated trade
unions".

In the same Address, which was in fact aimed against
the KAPD and its position of calling on workers to leave the unions and set up
unitary factory organizations, Zinoviev made a travesty of the real situation
of the trade unions in Europe:

"In a whole number of countries a power­ful
process of decantation is going on in the unions. The wheat is being separated
from the chaff. In Germany, where the unions are led by Legren and Noske, the
main pillars of the bourgeois yellow trade union movement, a large number of
trade unions are turning their backs on the yellow social democrats and are
going over to the proletarian revolution. ...In Italy, almost without
exception, the unions stand for soviet power. In the Scandinavian trade unions,
the prol­etarian revolutionary current gets bigger every day. In France,
Britain, America, Holland and Spain, the mass of trade union members are
detaching themselves from the bourgeoisie and demanding new revolutionary
methods".

Far
from helping the Communist Parties to break from Social Democracy, this
orientation, based on the illusion of a real ‘class unionism' actually meant
following the same practices as the counter-revolution, albeit from the stand­point
of competing with Social Democracy to gain control over the masses.

This
orientation was a major obstacle against the possibility of deepening the union
question inside the different organizations that made up the CI. The analysis
of the nature of trade unions and trade unionism was often confused and
contradictory, and this was further complicated by the influence of a number of
currents coming out of the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism.

In
February 1920, the International Conference in Amsterdam adopted the theses
presented by Fraina, secretary of the Communist Party of America and an IWW
militant. According to the theses,

"...11) The agitation for the construction of
industrial unions will provide an immed­iate and practical way of mobilizing
the militant spirit of discontent which is developing in the old unions, of
waging the struggle against the corrupt bureau­cracy of the ‘labor aristocracy'.
Industrial unionism also makes it possible to issue a call to action to the
unqual­ified, unorganized workers, and to lib­erate the unqualified workers who
are organized in the trade unions from the tutelage of the reactionary strata
of the working class. The struggle for revolu­tionary industrial unionism is a
factor in the development of communist under­standing and in the conquest of
power."

This analysis took up the ambiguous theory of the ‘labor
aristocracy', which was seen to be one of the bases for the conservative chara­cter
of trade unionism. This led to the idea that
craft unions were the reactionary form of trade unionism, and should be
replaced by industrial unions. Although it tried to relate the evolution of the
unions to imperialism and the tendency towards state capitalism, and attempted
to emphasize the limits of unionism, this orientation ended up opposing one form of unionism without calling unionism
itself into question:

".....5) The
development of imperialism has definitively integrated the craft unions into
capitalism...

".....8)
The governmental expression of lab­orism is state capitalism, the fusion into
the state of the capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie, and the upper strata of
the working class which dominate the trade unions..

".....10)
...The struggle against this form of trade unionism (craft unionism) is
therefore a an inseparable phase of the struggle against laborism, through

a) in a general way, the agitation of
the communist party to push the unions to act in a more resolute way;

b) the encouragement of any movement in
the unions which tends to break the hold of the bureaucracy and give control to
the masses through directly mandated and revocable dele­gates;

c) the formation of organizations such
as shop stewards' committees, workers' committees, workers' economic councils
and the direct organizations of the communist party in the workshops, factories
and mines - organizations which will not only push the masses and the unions
towards more revolut­ionary forms of action, but which will also, at a moment
of crisis, develop into soviets;

d) the attempt to transform craft unions
into industrial unions, ie a form of unionism which corresponds to the economic
integration of modern capitalism and inspired by the spirit of struggle for
political power and economic domination".
(ibid).

Some of these ideas were very close to the positions
held by the German and Dutch left. They attempted to criticize and go beyond
economism, reformism, and ‘apolitical' unio­nism, but they remained on the
level of the form of organization. It wasn't understood that you could no
longer create new, mass unitary organizations of a permanent char­acter. The idea was that you had to find organizational
forms that would preserve the independence of the class and prepare the way for
the formation of workers' councils. But such a view could by no means guarantee
the proletariat's independence from the bourgeoisie, since it reduced the break
with trade unionism to a question of forms of organization.

It was perhaps the Italian revolutionary Gramsci who --
in the name of criticizing trade unionism -- went furthest in developing an
erroneous political line that would greatly contribute to disorientating the
Italian working class in the 1920's. In an article published in his paper L'Ordine
Nuovo, November 1919, Gramsci seems to develop a promising critique of trade
unionism:

" The
syndicalist theory has failed completely in the concrete experience of the
proletarian revolutions. The unions have shown their organic inability to em­body
the dictatorship of the proletariat. The normal development of the unions has
been to move away from the revolutionary spirit of the masses...The spirit of
conquest has weakened or completely disappeared, the vital élan has been
broken, the ‘bread and butter' practices of opportunism have replaced the old
heroic intransigence....Trade unionism can only be called revolutionary because
there is the grammatical possibility of putting the two expressions together.
Trade unionism has shown itself to be none other than a form of capitalist
society and not a potential form for socialist society."

But
behind this critique lay an inability to draw the lessons of the Russian
revolution and understand the basis for the emergence of workers' councils. Far
from seeing it as an organ of political power, a place where the working class
could develop its consciousness, Gramsci considered the workers' council to be
an organ of economic management. It was on these foundations that he erected
his critique of the trade unions, and this critique wasn't deep enough to allow
the workers to develop a real understanding of the function of the unions.

"The craft or
industrial union, by group­ing together those in a particular craft or industry
who use the same instruments or transform the same raw materials, helps to
reinforce this psychology, to further prevent the workers from seeing them­selves
as producers." (Ordine Nuovo 8/11/19).

This
analysis of Gramsci ignored the question of the destruction of the bourgeois
state and turned the factory and the proletariat into purely economic
categories:

"The place where
one works, where the producers live and work together, will tomorrow be the centers
of the social organism and will replace the directing organs of contemporary
society." (Ordine Nuovo, 13/9/19).

By
remaining on the terrain of production and economic management, Gramsci's
propaganda ended up by calling on the workers to safe­guard the economy, and
thus to defend capit­alism:

"The workers want to put an end to this situation of
disorder, of chaos, and ind­ustrial waste. The national economy is going to
rack and ruin, the rate of exchange is soaring, production is decl­ining, the
whole national apparatus of industrial and agricultural production is moving
towards paralysis.... If the industrialists are no longer capable of
administering the productive apparatus and making it produce at maximum output
(and every day shows more and more clearly that they're not capable of doing
this), then, to save society from bankruptcy and ruin, the workers will assume
this task, conscious of the grave responsibility they are assuming; and they
will explain this with their communist methods and systems, through their
production councils." (L'Avanti, 21/11/19).

The
fraction animated by Bordiga denounced this analysis:

"It's a grave error to believe that, by
introducing into the contemporary prol­etarian milieu, among capitalism's
wage-earners, formal structures which are thought to be the basis for communist
management, you are developing forces that are intrinsically revolutionary.
This was the error of the syndicalists and it's also the error of the over-zealous
enthusiasts for the factory councils." (I1 Soviet, 1 February 1920, quoted in Programme Communiste, no.72)

However,
the Italian left didn't explain why the new forms of unitary class organization
had arisen in opposition to trade unions and trade unionism. Their correct
criticism of solutions that restricted themselves to forms of organization left
the door open to the Bordigist error, caricatured today by the PCI (Programme
Communiste), which sees all forms of class organization as one and
the same and insists only on the dominant role of the party. Thus, in Il Soviet 21/9/19 it was claimed that "the soviets of tomorrow must have their
source in the local sections of the communist party" (cited in Programme Communiste no.74, p.64). Against
ouvrierism and factoryism, you had a party-fetishism which failed to make a
materialist analysis of the declining phase of capitalism and its effects on
the mode of class organization. Only such an analysis would have made it
possible to understand the failure of the unions as proletarian organs and to seewhy the content of the ‘classical'
trade unionism of the ascendant period had become obsolete in the epoch of "wars
and revolutions", ie in the period of capitalist decadence.

In
the years that followed, the debate which had unfolded in all the sections of
the CI got bogged down. The general retreat of the working class in Europe, the
defeats suffered by the German proletariat, the isolation of Russia, the crystallization
of the CI's errors, its accelerating degeneration -- all this would add weight
to the theory of defending the proletarian bastion, which led to com­promises
and stifled the voice of the commun­ist left. Then, open opportunism gave way
to a period which saw the direct liquidation of every revolutionary position
and the death of the CI as an international proletarian organization. The
unions controlled by the CI were the first forces used by the Stalinists in
Europe to isolate those communists who had remained faithful to
internationalism and the revolution, and to drag the working class back into
submission to the capitalist state and nation.

Contradictions
and limits of the analysis of the revolutionary milieu

Although
he was expelled from the Bolshevik party by the Stalinist clique and exiled
from Russia, Trotsky himself had a heavy respons­ibility for the orientations
of the CI and the policies adopted by the Russian state, notably the repression
of the Kronstadt strikes. Trotsky had supported Lenin against the "infantile
disorder" of left communism. Faced with the degeneration of the CI and the
counter-revolutionary policies of the Russian state, Trotsky didn't question
the basis of the CI's policies. He didn't connect his struggle to the struggle
of the left communists. This attitude expressed all the limits of Trotsky's
opposition to the counter-revolutionary Stalinism. The whole orientation of the
left opposition which gyrated around his personality was marked by the same
weakness, ie an inability to under­stand and recognize the
counter-revolutionary process in Russia itself.

1.Trotsky

Paradoxically,
Trotsky approached the union question on two levels. In the early 1920's within
the Bolshevik party in power, Trotsky defended the idea that the unions had to
be integrated into the state, in contrast to Lenin who insisted that "our present State is such that the whole organized
proletariat must defend itself against it. We must use these workers'
organizations for defending the workers against their state".

What
a clear confession by Lenin about the conservative character of the
transitional state and about the need for the working class to preserve its
independence vis-a-vis the state: But Lenin's position, like that of Kollantai's
workers Opposition which called for a strengthening of the trade unions, was an
illusory one and couldn't lead to a real understanding of the nature of the unions.
The ultra-statist position was more ‘logical'. For Trotsky, the trade union was
a state instrument par excellence and there he wasn't mistaken: Trotsky's error
was on the question of the ‘proletarian' character of the state:

Concerning the intervention of revolutionaries in the
unions, Trotsky defended the ‘official' analyses within the CI:

"The importance of the trade unions consists
in the fact that they are mainly composed of elements who are not yet under the
influence of the party. But it's obvious that there are different layers in the
unions: layers that are quite conscious, layers that are conscious but retain
various prejudices, layers that are still seeking to form their revolutionary
consciousness. Who then is going to assume the task of leadership? ...Yes, we
want to subordinate the consciousness of the working class to revolutionary
ideas. That is our aim". (Report to the 4th World Congress,
December 1922).

Once he was in the opposition and faced with the
counter-revolution, Trotsky nuanced his analyses, or rather went beyond the
simplistic propaganda of the early years of the CI. In a text written in
September 1933, Trotsky put forward a much more lucid position on the union
question:

"The trade
unions appeared in the period of growing, ascendant capitalism. Their task was
to raise the material and cult­ural level of the proletariat and extend its political rights. This work,
which has been going on in Britain for over a century, has given the trade
unions an immense authority within the proletariat. The decadence of British
capitalism, in the context of the decline of the world capitalist system, has
undermined the very basis for the reformist work of the trade unions... The
role of the unions, as we said above, is no longer a progressive role but a
reactionary one."
(Trotsky, Oeuvres, T.11 EDI, p.178).

However,
Trotsky stuck to the illusion that it was possible and necessary to work in
these organs:

"It's precisely in the present period, when
the reformist bureaucracy of the proletariat has been transformed into the
economic police force of capital, that revolutionary work in the unions,
carried out with intelligence and perseverance, can give decisive results in a relatively short span of time." (ibid, our
emphasis)

But at the same time, Trotsky advanced the perspective
of a break with the unions:

"It is
absolutely necessary right away to prepare the advanced workers with the idea
of creating workshop committees and workers' councils at a moment of sudden
crisis." (ibid).

But this vision remained abstract and didn't
correspond to the experience of the workers' movement. In fact Trotsky reduced
the question of the appearance of real organs of proletarian struggle to a
simple matter of tactics, to be decided upon by the organization of revolut­ionaries.
Trotsky's voluntarism hardly concealed a lack of confidence in the capac­ities
of the class. Certainly, these capac­ities had begun to diminish by the end of
the 1920's, but, just as with the question of the defense of Russia, Trotsky
like many other revolutionaries was unable to see that the class had been
defeated and the draw the necessary conclusions, both on the theoreti­cal and
the organizational level.

2. The
Italian Left: Bilan

The fraction of the Italian left grouped around the
review Bilan put forward a very
different perspective:

"To affirm that
you're aiming to found new parties
on the basis of the first four Congresses of the CI, is to tell history to
march backwards for ten years; it will prevent you from understanding the
events that took place after these Congresses; it means trying to place these
new parties in a narrow historic framework that isn't their own. The framework
for the new parties is already molded by the experience that has come from the
exercise of proletarian power and by the whole experience of the world
communist movement. In this work the first four Congresses are an element for
study which must be subjected to the most intense critique." (Bilan, no.1, November 1933).

Understanding
that the proletariat had suffered a political
defeat, the Italian left envisaged the problem of the presence of
revolutionaries in the trade unions solely from the standpoint of the defensive
struggle. Since they considered that, for a whole period, there was no
possibility of the emergence of revolutionary class organs of the council-type,
Bilan saw that there was no room for
the kind of activity that counted on such developments. Similarly, the collapse
of the CI excluded the possibility of the reconstruct­ion of the international
class party in the short term. For Bilan,
therefore, it wasn't a question of elaborating a union strategy that would
continue the orientation of ‘Lenin's' Comintern, but of preserving the capacity
of the class to defend itself. But Bilan
retained many illusions about the historic continuity of the unions:

"Even in the hands of the reformists, the
unions remain, for us, the place where the workers must gather together, the
soil for the upsurge of proletarian consciousness that will sweep aside the
current rotten­ness.... If movements take place outside the unions, they must
obviously be supp­orted." (Bilan,
no.25, Nov-Dec. 1935)[1].

The Italian left, like Trotsky, remained prisoners of
the erroneous analysis of the CI, and above all of a period in which it was
difficult to draw all the conclusions from a revolutionary wave that had not
reached its goals and had not clarified with sufficient sharpness the issue of
breaking from trade unionism. Moreover, the triumph of the fascist, democratic
and Stalinist counter­revolution didn't favor the development of theories based
on the spontaneous capacity of the
working class to organize itself, as shown by the appearance of workers' councils.
The period served mainly to give evidence of the insufficiencies of
revolutionaries, both in Germany during the revolutionary wave and in Russia
where the proletariat had taken power. The decisive question of the party, its nature and function, was
discussed much more and acted as a sort of screen which prevented
the revolutionary fractions from taking
a step back and having a more global view of what the
revolutionary process had meant from the standpoint of the activity and
consciousness of the proletariat as awhole. Without this overall view of
how the class movement had begun to confront a decadent
capitalism, it wasn't possible to clarify
the union question.

3. The Council
Communists

The
council communists came up against the same barriers in their critique
of trade unionism. This current, partly descended from the German and Dutch
left, developed a scathing
critique of ‘Leninism' which ended up questioning the class nature of the Russian
revolution and calling it bourgeois.
In fact, the councilist current returned to a series of ‘anti-party'
prejudices borrowed from the anarchist and revolutionary syndic­alist
tradition. Against parties and unions, the councilists advocated the power of
the workers' councils, the only form of organization
that could enable the class to acquire, by itself, a consciousness of its
historic tasks and the capacity to carry them out. The critique
of trade unionism thus consisted essentially of a critique of the union struct­ures,
which didn't allow the working class to have a real life and autonomous
activity:

"The unions grew
as capitalism and heavy industry developed, becoming gigantic organizations
with thousands of members throughout entire countries, with bran­ches in every
town and factory. Function­aries were nominated... these functionaries are the
leaders of the unions. These are the ones who conduct negotiations with the
capitalists, a task in which they've become past masters... such an organization
is no longer just an assembly of workers; it is an organized body with a
political outlook, a character, a mentality, traditions and functions of its
own. It's interests are different from those of the working class and it will
not hesitate to defend those interests." (A. Pannekoek, International Council Corr­espondence, January
1936).

All
these criticisms were correct and still form an important part of the
revolutionary position on the trade unions. But it's not enough to see the
bureaucraticism, the retro­grade mentality of the unions, their inability to
combat capitalism. This bureaucratic character appeared relatively quickly at
the end of the 19th Century, and for a long time Marxism had pointed out the ‘narrow'
character of trade unionism. In Wages,
Price and Profit (1866) Marx defined these limits very clearly:

"Trade Unions
work well as centers of res­istance against the encroachments of capital. They
fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from
limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing
system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized
forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to
say, the ultimate aboli­tion of the wages system."

The
Marxist movement had even developed the basis of an analysis of how the unions
were ceasing to be the mode of organization of the class. In an article
published in the British union paper Labor
Standard, May-June 1881, Engels explained:

"More
than this, there are plenty of symptoms that the working class of this country
is awakening to the conscious­ness that it has for some time been moving in the
wrong groove; that the present movements for higher wages and shorter hours
exclusively, keep it in a vicious circle out of which there is no issue; that
it is not the lowness of wages which forms the fundamental evil, but the wages
system itself. This knowledge once gener­ally spread amongst the working class,
the position of Trades Unions must change con­siderably. They will no longer
enjoy the privilege of being the only organizations of the working class. At
the side of, or above, the Unions of special trades there must
spring up a general Union, a political organization of the working class as a
whole."

The councilists' critique of the unions thus consisted
of a revival of certain elements in the Marxist analysis of the unions -- one
that was hardly deepened and which tended to look at the unions as if they had
always belonged to the bourgeoisie (a position which certain of today's sects,
like the PIC, have ended up with). The councilists didn't understand the
material basis for the unions' movement into the bourgeois camp, their
integration into the
state, their counter-revolutionary function. What's more, in a critique of some
of Grossmann's ideas about the necessity for the collapse of capitalism,
Pannekoek expressed his incompre­hension and rejection of the concept of the
decadence of capitalism:

"The impotence of trade union action, an
impotence which appeared a long time ago, must not be attributed to any
economic collapse but to a displacement of powers within
society....Parliamentarism and union tactics didn't wait for the present crisis
to prove themselves to be useless - they've already shown this for decades. It's
not because of the economic collapse of capitalism, but because of the monstrous
deployment of its power, its extension across the earth, the exacerbation of
its political conflicts, the violent reinforce­ment of its internal strength,
that the proletariat must resort to mass action, deploying the strength of the
whole class." (Pannekoek, June 1934, in no.1 of Rate­korrespondenz, organ of the Group of International Communists
in Holland).

This
article was aimed at Rosa Luxemburg's theory, schematized by Grossmann. It was
easy to criticize Grossmann's mechanistic approach to economics, but Pannekoek
didn't respond to the basic question: had trade unionism always been useless,
or hadn't the possibility of gaining economic and political reforms in the
ascendant period been the basis of parliamentarism and trade unionism? It wasn't
enough to understand the pernicious effects that this reality had had on the
workers' movement (reformism, economism, opportunism within Social Democracy);
it was also necessary to understand that this particular phase in the activity
of the class was over once and for all; that Stalinism, for example, was not a ‘neo-reformist'
or ‘neo-opportunist' deviation of the workers' movement, but an expression of
decadent capitalism. To recognize that world capitalism had entered its period
of decadence, of historic decline, didn't mean taking on a fatalistic,
wait-and-see attitude to history. It meant a class ruptures with the old social
democratic theories, with the polit­ical and organizational methods that had
been appropriate to the ascendant phase of capit­alism.

The
councilists had a vision of the need for this rupture, but it remained a
partial one. On the one hand, this current was far from being homogenous (cf
our articles on the Dutch left in IR
16, 17, and 21). On the other hand, the councilists looked for the causes of
defeat solely in the politics of the CI and the Bolshevik party. This led them
to underestimate the activity of commun­ists and to abandon the idea that it
was necessary to prepare for the revolution through the reconstitution of the
party. Pannekoek more and more gave up defending the need for the party and
restricted himself to a role of pleading in favor of class autonomy.

But
although these weaknesses led the counc­ilist current into profound errors on
the question of the party, it would be a grave mistake to forget that the
councilists really deepened the whole question of the self-organization of the
class and thus raised a problem that was crucial to the period of decadence.
From the moment that trade unions and trade unionism were seen to be opposed to
the revolutionary activity of the working class, it was necessary to point out
the new forms that the workers' struggle was adopting. Pannekoek dealt with
this question in his text on the workers councils, written during World War II:

"Direct action means action of the workers
themselves without the intermediary of trade union officials. Such a strike is
called a wildcat as contrasted to the strike proclaimed by the union according
to the rules and regulations... They are the harbingers of future greater
fights, when great social emergencies, with heav­ier pressure and deeper
distress, drive the masses into stronger action." (Pannekoek, The Workers Councils)

Pannekoek
insisted on the ability of the workers to conduct their struggles themselves,
to experience their own potential and coll­ective force, without falling into a
crude ‘spontaneosm' or into a schematic, linear vision of the process of
working class self-organization:

"The self-determination of the workers over
their fighting action is not e demand put up by theory, by arguments of
practibility, but the statement of a fact evolving from practice. Often in
great social movements it occurred -- and doubtless will occur again -- that
the actions did not comply with the decisions. Sometimes central committees
made an appeal for a universal strike, and only small groups here and there
followed; elsewhere the committees weighed scrupulously, without venturing a
decision, and the workers broke loose in mass struggle. It may be possible even
that the same workers who enthusiastically resolved to strike shrink back when
standing before the deed. Or, conversely, that prudent hesitation governs the
decisions and yet, driven by inner forces, a non-resolved strike irresistibly
breaks out. Whereas in their conscious thinking old watchwords and theories
play a role and determine arguments and opinions, at the moment of decision on
which weal and woe depend, strong intuition of real condit­ions breaks forth,
determining the actions. This does not mean that such intuition always guides
right...

Thus the two
forms of organization and fight stand in contrast, the old one of trade unions
and the regulated strike, the new
one of the spontaneous strike and workers' councils. This does not mean that
the former at some time will be simply substituted by the latter as the only
alternative. Intermediate forms may be conceived, attempts to correct the evils
and weaknesses of trade unionism and preserve its right principles..."
(ibid).

Pannekoek's defense of the autonomy of the proletariat
in its struggles certainly contains ambiguities and weaknesses, but these were,
in a more profound sense expressions of the general condition of the
revolutionary milieu in a period of counter-revolution, a period in which the
horrors of World War II had come along to make the activity of the class and of
revolutionaries even more difficult. What was important and decisive in this
text, as in those of other internationalist proletarian currents, was its
confidence in the working class as a revolutionary force.

This is why it would be a mistake to pose the
trajectory of the Italian left against that of the council communists and to
see either one or the other of these currents as the ‘pure' expression of Marxist
continuity. Neither is it a question of making an eclectic synthesis of the
political positions developed by these currents in the 1930's or the imm­ediate
post-war period. The merit of the Gauche Communiste de France, which published Internationalisme, was precisely its
ability to avoid making a fetish out of ‘tradition', to reject the apologetic
glorification of one current against the others -- a road that was
unfortunately followed by a part of the Italian left, contrary to the whole
spirit of Bilan. In order to do
this, the Bordigists had to throw Bilan into
the dustbin and allow Bordiga to start theoretical work from scratch -- which in fact meant a return
to the old Leninist errors and a rejection of the gains made by
the Italian left, notably on the national question and on the question of decadence.

Chenier

[1] Very few
texts in Bilan dealt with the union
question directly, but although there was a sort of official position which
remained attached to the Leninist viewpoint, the recognition of the decadence
of capitalism led a tendency within Bilan
to re-evaluate the union question.